Welcome! Here you will find resources to support research in the field of Environmental Studies. This guide is designed for Oakton's students, faculty, and the larger community.
Contains hundreds of hours of film about various areas of environmental studies. Some environmental areas of study include ethics, law, planning, science, economics, and sociology.
Selected Books from the Catalog
As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
by
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
The story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism. Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9780807073780
Publication Date: 2019
Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice
by
Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys
The controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) made headlines around the world in 2016. Supporters called the pipeline key to safely transporting American oil from the Bakken oil fields of the northern plains to markets nationwide, essential to both national security and prosperity. Native activists named it the "black snake," referring to an ancient prophecy about a terrible snake that would one day devour the earth. Activists rallied near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota for months in opposition to DAPL, winning an unprecedented but temporary victory before the federal government ultimately permitted the pipeline. Oil began flowing on June 1, 2017. The water protector camps drew global support and united more than three hundred tribes in perhaps the largest Native alliance in U.S. history. While it faced violent opposition, the peaceful movement against DAPL has become one of the most crucial human rights movements of our time. Black Snake is the story of four leaders--LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White--and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of Native nations combating environmental injustice and longtime discrimination and rebuilding their communities. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9781496227638
Publication Date: 2021
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise; (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9781571318718
Publication Date: 2013
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
by
Julie Sze
"Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice."--Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.
Call Number: Select title for location and availability
ISBN: 9780520300736
Publication Date: 2020
A Field Guide to the Biodiversity of the Chicago Region
by
Gulezian, Paul Zorn
This Field Guide is designed as an introduction to the natural history, habitats, ecosystems, and biodiversity of the 7-county Chicago region of northeastern Illinois. The book includes introductory chapters on the region's geology and topography; habitats and ecosystems; people and land use; environmental philosophy; and conservation and restoration. The major portion of the guide includes species accounts of 555 species in the region including: 189 herbaceous plants; 53 woody plants; 14 spore plants and lichens; 21 fungi; 13 fishes; 24 amphibians and reptiles; 90 birds; 22 mammals; 112 insects; and 17 non-insect invertebrates. The field guide is also useful in many areas of the upper Midwestern United States.
Call Number: QH76.5.I3 G85 2019
ISBN: 1643860054
Publication Date: 2019
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
by
David Treuer
"Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, he shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era."
Call Number: Select title for location and availability
ISBN: 1594633150
Publication Date: 2019
The Incredible Journey of Plants
by
Stefano Mancuso; Gregory Conti (Translator)
Named a Best Book of the Year for the Know-It-All by The Globe and Mail In this richly illustrated volume, a leading neurobiologist presents fascinating stories of plant migration that reveal unexpected connections between nature and culture. When we talk about migrations, we should study plants to understand that these phenomena are unstoppable. In the many different ways plants move, we can see the incessant action and drive to spread life that has led plants to colonize every possible environment on earth. The history of this relentless expansion is unknown to most people, but we can begin our exploration with these surprising tales, engagingly told by Stefano Mancuso. Generation after generation, using spores, seeds, or any other means available, plants move in the world to conquer new spaces.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9781635429916
Publication Date: 2020
Mario and the Hole in the Sky: How a Chemist Saved Our Planet
by
Elizabeth Rusch; Teresa Martinez (Illustrator)
The true story of how a scientist saved the planet from environmental disaster. Mexican American Mario Molina is a modern-day hero who helped solve the ozone crisis of the 1980s. Growing up in Mexico City, Mario was a curious boy who studied hidden worlds through a microscope. As a young man in California, he discovered that CFCs, used in millions of refrigerators and spray cans, were tearing a hole in the earth's protective ozone layer. Mario knew the world had to be warned--and quickly. Today Mario is a Nobel laureate and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His inspiring story gives hope in the fight against global warming.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9781580895811
Publication Date: 2019
No Planet B: A Teen Vogue Guide to Climate Justice
by
Lucy Diavolo (Editor)
An urgent call for climate justice from Teen Vogue, one of this generation's leading voices, using an intersectional lens - with critical feminist, indigenous, antiracist and internationalist perspectives. As the political classes watch our world burn, a new movement of young people is rising to meet the challenge of climate catastrophe. This book is a guide, a toolkit, a warning and a cause for hope.
Call Number: Available Online
ISBN: 9781642592597
Publication Date: 2021
Organic Food and Farming: A Reference Handbook
by
Shauna M. McIntyre
Organic Food and Farming: A Reference Handbook is a valuable resource for high school and college students curious about the history, evolution, and growth of the organic food movement. Organic Food and Farming: A Reference Handbook begins with a deep dive into the origins of organic farming, offering a clear discussion of what constitutes organic production and how that has changed over time. Next, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of growth of organics as both an industry and a social movement and the inherent challenges that occur from trying to be both. The book additionally covers controversial issues and challenges, along with good news about what is working and what is possible. Included are essays by scholars, farmers, and experts working with NGOs as well as profiles of key people and organizations in the organic sector. Additional chapters include data and documents, a comprehensive resource list, and a detailed chronology of the key events in the history of the organic sector.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9781440870040
Publication Date: 2021
Sustainability : Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power
by
Sze, Julie, editor
A critical resource for approaching sustainability across the disciplines Sustainability and social justice remain elusive even though each is unattainable without the other. Across the industrialized West and the Global South, unsustainable practices and social inequities exacerbate one another. How do social justice and sustainability connect? What does sustainability mean and, most importantly, how can we achieve it with justice? This volume tackles these questions, placing social justice and interdisciplinary approaches at the center of efforts for a more sustainable world.
Call Number: Select title for location and availability
ISBN: 1479822442
Publication Date: 2018
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by
David Wallace-Wells
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible--food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation's Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it--the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation--today's.
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9780525576716
Publication Date: 2020
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
by
Katharine K. Wilkinson (Editor); Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Editor)
NATIONAL BESTSELLER . Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. "A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?"-The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement- leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone. All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States-scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race-and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, the book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.
Call Number: Select title for location and availability
ISBN: 9780593237069
Publication Date: 2020
The Story of More
by
Hope Jahren
"Hope Jahren is the voice that science has been waiting for." --Nature "A superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years, written in a brilliantly sardonic and conversational style." --E. O. Wilson "Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet? The Story of More is thoughtful, informative, and--above all--essential." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions--from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles--that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming--from superstorms to rising sea levels--and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren's inimitable voice, The Story of More is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it.
Call Number: Select title for location and availability
ISBN: 9780525563389
Publication Date: 2020
The Politics of Climate Change Knowledge: Labelling Climate Change-Induced Uprooted People
by
Nowrin Tabassum
This book addresses political knowledge of climate change and its relation to labelling people affected by climate change, either as 'climate refugees' or as 'climate change-induced displaced people or migrants'. By questioning the knowledge of climate change and subsequent labelling of people, this book will spark debate in studies of global climate politics and transnational policy networks. Rather than considering the issue of climate change as a given phenomenon, the author explores how the politicized knowledge of climate change has been produced in international negotiations and how that knowledge is transmitted from global forums to local country levels via climate change action plans and resilience projects. This book introduces the concept of multi-scalar knowledge brokers (MKBs) - individual actors who work at multiple levels (local, national, and international) to transmit the knowledge of climate change from global level to local level. The author uses the primary case study of Bangladesh to demonstrate how the dominant actors in global climate politics - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the World Bank, as well as the USA and the UK - interact with the government and local NGOs in Bangladesh regarding transmitting the knowledge of climate change, labelling the uprooted people, and implementing resilience projects. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of international relations, environmental politics, climate change studies, political ecology, political geography, and migration and displacement studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license.
ISBN: 1000546071
Publication Date: 2022
The Sanitation Triangle: Socio-Culture, Health and Materials
by
Yamauchi, Taro.; Nakao, Seiji.; Harada, Hidenori.
Highlights inter-disciplinary collaboration between engineering, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Presents micro-approach based on the social relationship and the situations of the local community. Describes new community-based bottom-up approach such as participatory action research. This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access.
This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
Call Number: Available Online
ISBN: 9811677115
Publication Date: 2022
Advancing Environmental Education Practice
by
Krasny, Marianne E.
"Environmental education can foster behavior change and collective action by going beyond knowledge and attitudes to consider efficacy, identity, sense of place, social capital, nature connectedness, norms, and nudges"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: Available Online
ISBN: 9781501747090
Publication Date: 2020
Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?
by
Jessica Fanzo
How can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to improve food systems before our planet loses its ability to sustain itself and its people? Do we have the right to eat wrongly? As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersect--and often collide--how can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and purchase food? Can such changes in practice and policy reverse the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations? Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? is a clarion call for both individual consumers and those who shape our planet's food and environmental policies that: * describes the often destructive path that foods take from farms and seas through their processing, distribution, marketing, purchasing and waste management sites * explores the complex web of factors impacting our ability to simultaneously meet nutritional needs, sustain biodiversity and protect the environment * raises readers' food and environmental literacy through an engaging narrative about Fanzo's research on five continents along with the work of other inspiring global experts who are providing solutions to these crises * empowers readers to contribute to immediate and long-term changes by informing their decisions in restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, and kitchens
Call Number: Available Online
ISBN: 1421441136
Publication Date: 2021
A Companion to Global Environmental History
by
J. R. McNeill (Editor); Erin Stewart Mauldin (Editor)
The Companion to Global Environmental History offers multiple points of entry into the history and historiography of this dynamic and fast-growing field, to provide an essential road map to past developments, current controversies, and future developments for specialists and newcomers alike. Combines temporal, geographic, thematic and contextual approaches from prehistory to the present day Explores environmental thought and action around the world, to give readers a cultural, intellectual and political context for engagement with the environment in modern times Brings together environmental historians from around the world, including scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and China
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 1444335340
Publication Date: 2012
Grounding Urban Natures - Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies
by
Henrik Ernstson; Sverker Sörlin; Joshua Lewis; Lindsay Sawyer; Anne Whiston Spirn
Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as "smart cities," "eco-cities," and "resilience," and proposing a "science of cities" based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of--and are shaped by--cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese "eco-city" Yixing. Contributors Mart n vila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker S rlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker
Via this link you can search for books, news articles, and academic articles. It casts a very wide net so you'll have to narrow your search quite a bit. After you enter the initial search, you can filter (limit) your results to peer-reviewed journals.